[Zope3-dev] Bare excepts in z3c.zalchemy

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

On 2 Mar 2007, at 12:10 , Jodok Batlogg wrote:
> On Mar 2, 2007, at 5:00 PM, Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
>
>> For the lack of a better mailinglist, I'm posting this to zope3-dev:
>>
>> z3c.zalchemy is pretty cool, but the tons of bare except clauses  
>> make me a bit uneasy. When I see them, I wonder what this code is  
>> expecting to fail and why. Plus, there are no comments as to why a  
>> try/except was used in the first place.
>
> can you elaborate?

I can't, other than I have no idea *why* these are bare excepts and  
not catching a specific exception. Which one I can't tell you, I'm  
not the original author and have no idea why catching an exception is  
necessary at that point anyway.

All I know is that bare excepts are potentially masking exceptions  
that I'd like to know about, especially when they're used like this:

   try:
       ...
   except:
       pass

With code like this I ask myself: what did the author think/ 
experience go wrong and why is it ok to just go on without making an  
error report??? I would at least expect a unit test that would  
exercise the except clause, but I can't find any mentioning of that  
either...

> i found six bare excepts. four of them in tearDown of the tests.  
> the remaining two in _doCreateTable and dropTable

Right. I'm not sure if it makes a difference where these bare excepts  
are. If they're in tests it's just as bad because the tests might be  
running fine while there's actually an error going on.